Nam Il

Nam Il (5 June 1915-7 March 1976) was the Foreign Minister of North Korea from April 1953 to October 1959, succeeding Pak Hon-yong and preceding Pak Song-chol.

Biography
Nam Il was born on 5 June 1915 in the Russian Far East to a family of Koreans, and he was educated at the Smolensk Military School and Tashkent in the Soviet Union. He became chief-of-staff of a division of the Red Army during World War II and fought at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, but after the end of the war, he headed to Soviet Korea to return to his homeland. In September 1950, Kim Il-sung appointed him as Chief of Staff of the Korean People's Army, succeeding Kang Kon. Nam Il was also used as the communists' delegate to peace talks from 1951 to 1953 during the Korean War, and he was known for using an amber cigarette holder to smoke. In February 1955, after the war's end, he called for cultural and economic relations with Japan, a country that had a rough history with Korea. In 1959, he relinquished the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Pak Song-chol, in 1975 he died in a collision between his car and a truck, believed to have been a part of Kim Il-sung's purge of all people that could be a threat to him.